Sipping my imperfection first thing in the morning

or adverbs, passive voice, and who the hell follows the rules?

I love to sip my imperfection. Each morning, I add a spoonful of doubt and a drop of anxiety to my sea-like mug that gently contains all my flaws. What a splendid drink I get. I sip it while watching the sleepy sun fight with tree branches to entangle its rays. The softness and goldiness of colors imbue my kitchen with morning warmth, and I feel a little bit dizzy as if I were inebriated with poetry.

My imperfection. The one that pluckily resists rules and always looks for ways to veer off the road of what one is supposed to do. I do not hate rules per se, please do not get me wrong! It’s just their monumental stiffness and unimpeachable rightness that foist on me the only possible way to things that suffocate me. 

Rules and their staleness. Rules exist to be broken, they say. Rules exist to eschew failures, I add. They lull you into believing – and what a skewed belief it is! – that if you follow them obediently and with a sprinkle of zest, your life path will be stainlessly free of mistakes and fuckups. 

What an untenable idea that is permeated with fear of living! For living this life is the synonym for committing mistakes. And who said that committing mistakes – with zest, of course – is less fun than freezing yourself in the barren space of not-to-dos? 

When you peruse the rules on how to write – and don’t tell me you have never ever opened a book on writing in your life! – the two gigantic nos are

DO NOT USE ADVERBS

And

AVOID THE PASSIVE VOICE

But I’m here today, on this joyful Friday, to be up to no good and to throw two counterexamples of when adverbs and the passive voice do perform some writing magic:

“He talked everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might.”

— Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

“Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see the Queen go past—poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes.”

— Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“When the Count was just seven, he was defeated so soundly by a neighboring boy in a game of draughts that, apparently, a tear was shed, a curse was uttered, and the game pieces were scattered across the floor.”

— A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles